Ceremonies

by T E. D Klein

  They were well past the stream now, heading north through the swampy sections of the woods, where their progress was slowed as their feet were sucked down by the mud. Yet even here the ground was quivering as if alive, and below it thunder rolled, as if echoing from caverns deep within the earth.

  There were other voices too, filling the darkness with sound. Occasionally he could hear the weird night cries of woodland creatures and, far off, a low, indistinct roaring as from a thousand animal throats; and once a great pale round shape had come hurtling toward them out of a clump of bushes like some boulder come to life, squealing in terror.

  'Brother Galen,' someone had called, "twas one o' your hogs.'

  And there was still another sound now, far in the distance, a vast and wrathful buzzing. It was like the warning growl that cats make just before they strike, only amplified a million times, or like the buzzing of a million bees.

  Panting, Freirs pushed onward, desperate to keep up with the others and afraid of losing them in the darkness. The sporadic shafts of moonlight illuminating the spaces between the trees were of little help and only confused him, like panels in a hall of mirrors. Branches seemed to reach out toward him, as if to hold him back. Thorns and brambles tore at him as he passed. Once, at the edge of the swamp, he tripped over a root and fell headlong in the mud, nearly losing the sickle. Floundering to his feet, he stumbled onward. The roaring was all around him now, rising and falling in time with the beating of the earth, and the buzzing had grown louder.

  They had emerged from the swamp and were passing through a stretch of slightly drier ground where the foliage was thinner, when they saw the fire. It was impossible to tell how large it was, or how far away. All of them were tired now, but seeing the flames through the skeletal forms of the trees, and with an objective at last in sight, they broke into a run, though not without a certain wariness lest the blaze prove so large they be forced to turn and flee.

  They ran with a new urgency as it became more apparent, the nearer they drew to it, that the fire had been man-made. And suddenly they were running over rocks and debris, the forest had fallen away, and they found themselves facing a wall of leaping flames as tall as they were, and waves of scorching heat, and blinding smoke that blotted out the sky. And beyond the flames, like a great dark presence at the end of a dream, stood the hill.

  It rose black and obscene in the moonlight, thrusting itself above the tops of the dwarfed trees like some huge squatting animal, its great humped back furred with clumps of vegetation. Freirs, racing up behind the others, saw them silhouetted against the fire at its base as they stumbled into the clearing with arms or weapons raised, and heard the screams of those who'd blundered too close to the flames. And above the screams a roaring split the night, and a buzzing as of insects, as loud as all the insects in the world; and the roaring came from all around them, from the land and the trees and the darkness itself, but the buzzing came only from the hill.

  Beneath the sound he heard a higher, rhythmic cry, the moaning of a woman in pain.

  'Carol!'

  She was somewhere above him on the hill. Freirs pushed through the crowd of men and hurried forward, but the heat was too intense; he fell back wincing with pain, gasping, eyes smarting.

  'She's up there!' He was shouting to anyone who could hear him over the deafening noise. No one turned. Several dim figures were poking feebly at the fire with pitchforks, keeping well back from the flames. He reached for the man who was closest, grabbing him roughly by the shoulder.

  'We've got to reach her!'

  The other turned, face glowing redly in the firelight, the eyes wide and frightened as a rabbit's, and Freirs saw that it was the leathery old farmer who'd given him a ride from town; he didn't even know the man's name. The farmer shook his head, said something unintelligible, pointed to his ear. He can't hear me, Freirs realized. And he doesn't hear Carol.

  Freirs shielded his eyes and looked for the others. Amid the smoke they seemed a crowd of milling shadows, their figures black against the flames, blurred and distorted by the rising waves of heat. None of them seemed to hear.

  The moaning came again.

  She was just behind the wall of fire, he was sure of it; she sounded almost close enough to touch. And she was hurt, hurt badly; he could hear it in her voice. In despair he stared down at his body, with the fleeting realization that, for all its weight, it was a fragile and sensitive thing, easily pained, easy to damage irreparably, and knowing nonetheless that someone was going to have to do it, someone had to go. Fate, it seemed, had painted him into a corner; he had no choice. Throwing his left arm before his face and brandishing the sickle as if the flames were a curtain he could slice through, he thought of Carol as he wanted to remember her, so sweetly, trustingly naked that evening on the couch in her apartment, and leaped.

  And as he did so, just as his feet left the ground, a final thought struck him: what if this was not a wall of fire? What if it was thicker than a wall, or had no end at all? What if He felt his feet drag against timber stacked too high for him to clear, felt some of it give way as he crashed through. He was suddenly surrounded by flames. They licked at his legs and his feet, and he screamed and kicked out as his skin burned beneath his shoes and clothing, his lungs were bursting from the heat, he was breathing fire

  … and then he had passed through, he had tumbled among the rocks at the base of the hill and was dragging himself weakly to safety. Clutching the sickle, he staggered to his aching feet and looked up.

  The world was a blur, a roaring, earsplitting blur aglow with flame. In its wavering red light he saw the huge mound looming blackly overhead, throbbing as if it were alive, with steady even beats that shook the ground like thunder; he saw the crude truncated pyramid of boulders piled against its sloping side; he saw the narrow ledge some ten feet above him to his left, midway up the rockpile, with a figure that must be Carol still moaning, lying up there on her back so that he could see a pale slice of her body – a leg, an arm, an edge of naked breast – in a travesty of the way he'd just remembered her; and he saw the slender white form, supple as a milk snake, that curled over her in an arch no human should have made, a white rainbow of flesh with ends at Carol's head and feet. This final figure looked barely human; an emaciated naked man, perhaps, with an abnormally elongated body and a shaved head…

  He was no longer sure what he was seeing. Shapes were indistinct without his glasses, and the figures on the ledge seemed far away. He was sure the serpentine figure was a man, but he couldn't tell just where the face might be, or how a man could stretch like that, or what was happening to Carol; for all Freirs could see, the two might be enacting some strange solemn theorem of geometry. He noticed now that, in two places, slim white sticklike shapes hung down beneath the man's arched form like twin supports, pointing toward Carol's horizontal body, which now seemed to struggle and heave, her cries rising in pitch. Frantically he hauled himself up onto one of the lower boulders and climbed higher, drawing several yards closer to the level of the pair, and discerned at last the strips of black and white cloth binding Carol's wrists and ankles. He saw the sticks for what they were and realized, with a shock of disbelief, that what he was seeing was a rape.

  But the rapist's head and face, he saw now, were not where he'd expected to find them: the act occurring up there on the rocks was a reverse one, a living yin and yang, a mystical obscenity as smooth as a symbol of the zodiac. The white rod of the man's sex, a long, preternaturally thin phallus, exaggerated like the things the satyrs bore in old pagan images, hovered expectantly above the girl's mouth, a mouth still open wide and moaning, while from the rapist's own mouth hung what Freirs at first took, crazily, for a long pale twisted horn, an instrument of bone or wood, but which he now perceived was a living appendage that curled and quested toward her open legs like a great blind worm, prodding them softly and irregularly with its tip. There was a tiger stripe across one thigh; he saw, as he climbed closer, that her legs had been painted
at their juncture with a black design of two concentric rings.

  Suddenly, like some hungry predator that's sensed the prey at last, the appendage stiffened with a life of its own, stretched taut, and seemed to bury itself deeper between her legs. The girl's struggles ceased, and at the same moment her cries were silenced as the man's sex slipped between her lips.

  With the touch of these two organs it was as if a circuit had been forged, a switch thrown, the completion of a white circle there upon the altar, body linked to body, end to end, a double serpent swallowing its tail. Carol's body jerked as if touched with electricity, a great flash of red fire glowed up and down the length of the hill, and with it came the sound of the rending of earth.

  Clinging to the trembling rock, Freirs craned his neck, squinted upward through the smoke, and gasped. A crack had appeared in the dark slope above him. The hill was beginning to open. Inside, fires glowed a molten red, smoke belched forth into the night, and he could see, dimly within, a great bunched shape begin to stir, coiling and uncoiling, like a giant worm curled within an apple.

  He hung frozen to the rock face, watching as the fissure grew. The opening in the giant mound gaped wider like the jaws of some immense beast, and the buzzing that came from within it grew even more shrill, as if the sound itself might force open the portals still further.

  It was the sound that shook him free. He struggled forward now with a new urgency, ignoring the pain of his burned feet, clawing his way feverishly up the rocks that shook and heaved as if to throw him off, pulling himself at last to the ledge by his hands, one hand still gripping his weapon. Before him lay the spread form of Carol and the long white body arching over her, the face turned away, the torso like an immense white artery throbbing in time with the throbbing of the earth.

  Even in the darkness he could see that it looked barely human. And what had happened to the head? Once, as a boy, he had chanced to drop a jar of peanut butter onto a stone floor; the container had shattered, but the shards of glass had remained clinging loosely in place, held by the substance inside. So it was, he thought suddenly, crazily, of this creature's hairless skull: shattered like crockery, yet all the pieces still intact.

  The other took no notice as Freirs dragged himself onto the rock shelf beside them. Suddenly the white arc of the body tautened, the face, once hidden, turned toward Freirs, the tube filling the mouth, and in the moonlight Freirs recognized the farmer, his host and friend Sarr Poroth.

  The face stared past him with no more recognition than a scarecrow, the eyes unseeing. There was nothing behind them. Carol's body quaked, her legs sprawled open in the moonlight, and it dawned on Freirs what the concentric rings on them were for: a signpost for something unfamiliar with the human female body. A target.

  Slowly, as if it had read the revulsion in Freirs' mind, the farmer's eyes turned toward him, and the corners of the mouth stretched in a smile.

  In terror Freirs lashed out with the sickle, the metal flashing in the firelight. The thing before him barely quivered at the blows, as unyielding as a slab of dead meat. Idly it raised a ravaged hand and groped toward Freirs' face. With the next blow Freirs struck home, the sharpened blade sweeping cleanly through the appendage that snaked from the farmer's open mouth.

  Severed, the thing twisted and shriveled like a sliced-open worm, streaming obscene milky fluid. The farmer's body jerked twice, then fell limp upon Carol's. Above them the buzzing grew higher in pitch, became a scream as the thing within the mound thrust once more toward the stars, rising coil upon coil, then subsided. The seam began to close. Freirs saw the line of fire grow thinner as the massive blocks of earth slid together again, the great portals shutting. Miles to the south, the singing ceased as roses turned black and withered on their stems.

  The mound sank inward on itself, settling back to its original shape, the cracks closing completely and blocking the fire inside, the tremors subsiding. The white appendage hung limply from the corpse's mouth like a severed umbilical cord. Freirs looked down in time to see a tiny charcoal-black creature slip from the hollow tube and scurry down the rocks, a rodent fleeing the collapse of its home. Poroth's tale came back to him, the mouse within the dead man's gaping mouth. Before he could cry out, the creature had leaped nimbly down the wall of rocks and the dark earth had swallowed it up.

  The roaring was stilled, the vibrations had stopped. Around him now he could hear the innocent crackling of the flames and the voices of men pushing their way through to the hillside. Once again the sound of crickets filled the night.

  Carol lay dazed upon the altar, eyes shut, her mouth still hanging open. Freirs rolled the farmer's body off her; it was already stiffening, the appendage dry and withered. Gently he closed Carol's mouth as one would the mouth of a corpse, not daring to peer inside, and covered her nakedness with his torn and sweaty shirt, thinking how different the moaning, heaving woman he'd seen below the farmer had been from the Carol he'd known, and wondering, reluctantly, how much pain there'd really been in those sounds she'd made, and how much pleasure.

  Embracing her, he promised himself not to think too hard about it.

  The moon gazed silently upon his kiss, the stars stared coldly down; and if they heard his vow, they made no sign.

  Epilogue: Christmas

  Those same stars looked coldly down that winter upon the teeming city.

  The stores were open late that night for last-minute shopping. Crowds hurried through the frozen streets, arms laden with packages. Salvation Army bands competed with the sounds of the traffic. Steam rose from holes in the pavement.

  He walked with her, hand in hand, through the crowd. She was smiling at the shop windows, the Santas in the street, the excited, rosy faces of the children, but something in her gaze seemed far away, and always would be.

  He, too, was distracted. He was musing upon the holy birth now being celebrated, and upon the unholy one so narrowly averted that very summer. He reminded himself for the thousandth time that nothing, that night, had been born.

  And yet the monstrous thing itself, the thing the old man had given his life for, had not been destroyed. Might it not be living still, waiting in its egg of earth? Had he -interrupted the Ceremony in time?

  The stars trembled unseen beyond the lights of the city. He felt his wife's hand in his. Surrounded by the throng, he paused, listened a moment, then walked on.

  'What is it, Jeremy?' she asked. 'Is something wrong?'

  'It's nothing, honey,' he said. He smiled at her and clutched her hand more tightly. She hadn't heard it.

  But he had – he was almost sure of it. Above the sounds of the city, the taxi horns, the music, and the laughter, he had heard the roar of the dragon.

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